Squash: a Story of the Machine of Death
by Albert Berg
Summary: A man who's spent his life lying about his death card finally comes clean as his long life draws to a close.  A story based on the Machine of Death concept created by Ryan North.


This story is based on the Machine of Death concept created by Ryan North, although it has not been endorsed or sanctioned by Ryan North or anyone else involved with the Machine of Death project. For more information, or to purchase the original Machine of Death book, please visit

It feels strange to write this after all these years, all this time of keeping the secret and now...well maybe I feel like there's no point in keeping it any longer.

SQUASH. You always loved that one, loved to try to tear it apart and find what it might mean. You weren't frightened in the least about the prospect of impending death, not at that age, and, surprisingly enough, not now. Most people change when they find out for themselves, but you...well you just went right to work sorting out all the variables.

BUG. It was a good one I have to admit, wonderfully vague with lots of wiggle room. Probably the machine thought you'd be able to get out of it otherwise. Although whether BUG is as good as SQUASH I'll leave for you to decide.

Only my card, my real card doesn't say, SQUASH. Sorry kiddo. After all those brainstorming sessions we went through on that one, I hate to break it to you, but SQUASH was a lie.

It was easy to get fakes made back then, back in the so called good old days when the machine was new and shiny and no one quite believed it was for real, but everyone wanted to know anyway. Back then you could actually buy fake tickets right there in the shop where they had the machine in case you got something embarrassing like, CHOKES ON HUMAN FECES or something boring like, OLD AGE. All the cool kids wanted cool deaths, so the stores catered to them. Some people even got fake cards instead of getting the test at all, which was a bit of a problem at first because it made people doubt how accurate the machine really was. Back then it was just little white strips of cardboard if you could afford one of the nicer places, and cheap piece of register tape that would fade out in about a year if you couldn't. There were none of these newfangled security cards with the magnetic strip and embedded DNA strands, although I hear there are still people who can fake them for the right price.

I didn't plan to lie. For the longest time I didn't intend to get tested at all. I wasn't like some of those crazy no-faters they have now, it was just...I was happy. No, that's not the right word. Plenty of people are happy. I had something different and infinitely better. I was content.

If you ever wanted one piece of advice from me, one single thing that could help you on your road in life I would tell you this: learn to be content with what you have. It doesn't mean giving up your goals or aspirations, but it does mean realizing that life right now is all you have right now. It's best to make the most of it.

Me and your grandma had been married for going on ten years, which seemed like a long time back then but now...well now I'm starting to sound like an old man, which, thankfully, I am. Anyway, things were going okay for us back then, except for one thing. Your grandma really wanted to have kids.

We thought we were on our way a few times; the third actually made it all the way to term before he died. I don't think I've ever told you about that. I'm not sure if I ever even told your mom about it. Mostly it was because when your grandma was alive...well she never did completely get over it.

Anyway, it was around that time that things started to fall apart for us. She was frazzled around the edges after that last miscarriage, coming apart inside, and I didn't know what to do about it. She didn't turn away from me exactly, it was more of a...drift. Almost imperceptible, but also unstoppable. And then, one day, everything came to a head when I came home and saw her sitting on the couch with one of those small squares of cardboard that had become so recognizable. There were tears in her eyes.

I just stood there in the doorway with a gaping hole growing in the pit of my stomach, afraid to ask, but knowing there would be know way around asking. So, eventually, I asked.

She held it up to show me a single word written in all caps: CANCER.

Cancer. That wasn't so bad. Lots of people got CANCER, mostly because lots of people got cancer. It didn't mean you would die much earlier than normal, and anyway at the time I thought it might not be that bad.

I've had a lot of time to reconsider that position, particularly during the last few years watching her wasting away into nothingness, unable to help her or do anything to stop the pain, eventually coming to that awful point when I began to pray for her death, and still...still she lay there on that bed for another three months while all that she was was carried away.

But at the time, well it almost seemed like a reprieve. A guarantee of some sort of life ahead.

Only she didn't see it that way. Or maybe she did. Maybe she was just crying because...well who can say with women?

But that was the tipping point, because things really started to go downhill from there. There was never any shouting or screaming or name-calling, just a coldness between us like the early frost in October. It scared me. I didn't know what to do, how to make her come back. I thought she had stopped loving me, but now that I look back on it I think the problem went even deeper than that. She had stopped loving life. For her CANCER wasn't an omen of evil to come; it was an escape hatch.

And that was when I decided I to go and get tested myself. It didn't happen right away of course. Now that I look back on it I think there might have been a span of something like six months between the time she got her reading and I got mine, but by then it was really inevitable. That rare jewel of contentment that I hadn't even realized I had, was gone like the morning mist. And the more I thought about the things in my life that were slipping away, the more I wanted to know how it would all end. So I went.

You know the drill. Everyone knows the drill.

Finger in machine, machine sticks finger, machine takes blood, machine spits out card with death verdict on it.

And it may be vague, but it's never wrong.

Only when I got mine...I knew it was wrong. It had to be wrong. I know it seems stupid to think that way now, but you have to understand that back then all of this was so new, who was to say the thing might not mess up every now and then? I took the test again, just to be sure. They had a special on retakes, half off, so I guess I wasn't the first guy to want confirmation. But it was the same. Two cards. One verdict.

ELECTRIC CHAIR.

There were people back then that went crazy about their readings. Some of them decided that since they were fated to die a particular way that that meant life was out of their control. They could live as they wanted without guilt, because anything they did was the result of fate. Other people fought it tooth and nail, and even though no one ever really beat it, I always admired them a little. You might not be able to change the way you die, but if your card says HEART ATTACK and your response is to go out and load up on the cheeseburgers then you're a moron, plain and simple.

But I didn't know what to think. I knew I wasn't a killer, wasn't going to be a killer any time soon. I never once considered the possibility that there would be someone in my life I would even wish death upon. I thought it was possible I might be wrongly accused or something like that, but if that happened, it happened.

But just because I knew I wasn't going to kill anyone, convincing everyone else might not be so easy. People were judged by their death cards, especially if it was something damning like ELECTRIC CHAIR. There were even divorces that had broken up perfectly happy marriages because of a bad card. And even though my marriage wasn't perfectly happy, I wasn't ready for it to end, not yet. So I lied.

SQUASH. I picked it on a lark, because I liked the way it sounded. Made me want to laugh. Of course once I got home and showed your grandmother the card she swore she'd never cook squash for me again which was a shame because I rather like the stuff.

And after that things got better. I'm not stupid enough to say it anything to do with the tests, nor foolish enough to say that it didn't. I don't know. What I do know is that a few weeks after that your grandma was pregnant again, and although she went through a lot of sleepless nights worrying about it, at the end of nine months your mother was born without a hitch.

A little after that your Uncle Rudy and Aunt Sue were born, and we decided that three was enough for us.

By that time SQUASH had become something banal, just another fact of life. Of course I felt bad about the lie at first but then it became a part of me, something that was no longer good or bad, just there. Ditto for ELECTRIC CHAIR though I did catch myself pondering on that one from time to time.

I kept the cards, the real ones I mean. Kept them in my wallet, in the section with all my nonessential junk. I thought about burning them once or twice, because I knew how easy they would be for someone to stumble on there, but...well maybe I wanted to be found out. Maybe that's why I'm writing this letter to you now. But no one ever did find out. For the longest time I kept thinking it would happen for sure, but it never did.

And life...well life was good. There was some bad that came later with your grandma and the cancer, but on the whole I it's been a good ride. These past few years I've been a little lonelier than usual, but lucky for me your parents stayed close, and you...well you were always a wonder to me. So smart, so full of life. I know parents aren't allowed to play favorites, but I think it may be okay for grandparents, and you...you were always my favorite.

I want you to know, I don't care what you do with this letter. Tell your parents if you want. Or don't. It's your choice. As to the waiting ELECTRIC CHAIR...well, I still haven't killed anyone, and I doubt they'd have time to execute me at ninety-three years old even if our state still had the death penalty. Anyway I don't think they use "Old Sparky" anywhere in the US any more which means...well I don't know what it means.

To tell you the truth, after all these years, I'm sort of interested to find out.

Excerpt from the Sacramento News Journal:

Arthur Perry, a long lived and well respected member of the community, passed today when his electric wheelchair malfunctioned and sent him toppling into a ditch where he broke his neck and died. He was returning from posting a letter to his granddaughter when the malfunction occurred, the family said. Arthur is survived by three children, Anne, Ruddy, and Sue, and by seven grandchildren, Rose, Eli, Nathaniel, Arthur, Candace, James, and Phyllis.


End file.
